I had the surgery and everything was healing up nicely. I went out with a couple of my Korean guy friends and they told me about a trip that they wanted to take for our long weekend in August. Korean Independence Day is August 15th, which gave us a Monday off. They asked if I wanted to join, so I agreed that it would be fun and that we should do it. We decided that we would go to Jeju Island after we discovered that flights out of the country would be a little too expensive on such short notice.
Meanwhile, back at the school, I was having issues with my boss and her not really wanting to cover the cost of my surgery, even though it was stated in the contract that I get 100% health insurance. She called the insurance company and they were only willing to give about 60,000 won (roughly $60) toward the surgery which ended up costing about 450,000 (~$450). So, all of these expenses were out of my pocket for about a 2 month time period. This meant I was a little tight on money because I hadn't gotten a full paycheck since I had been in the US for a one month break. Plus, it turns out that there were unpaid bills that went several months back from all of my utilities. I had been under the impression that those had been taken care of by my boss and deducted from my paycheck each month...apparently this was not the case! That large chunk of money was taken out of my one paycheck I had received since I had been back, as well as the medical expenses, including my pain meds.
We ended up working something out eventually and my boss paid me the cost of the surgery, even though it was like pulling teeth to get that money from her. She urged me to not get too sick in the future (yeah, like I can prevent that) and I told her that I wouldn't have anything so expensive done if it wasn't absolutely necessary. My birthday was also roughly around this time, which my employers forgot about, but wasn't a huge deal. I ended up getting a puppy for myself and have had some ups and downs with the little brat! He is super cute, but man he loves to chew on things! He came with the name Mado (short "a" sound, long "o" sound) already, which means "beloved" in Spanish and "crazy" in Italian so I just stuck with it! Both words accurately describe this dog so I thought he could keep the name.
Ok, now on to the trip with the boys...I showed up to the airport on time and we all had a fairly quick and simple flight to Jeju-do or Jeju Island. The first night we got there, I had suggested that we try to get a hotel room right away, but the boys wanted to go out to a bar. I didn't want to leave the responsibility of trying to find a hotel up to the one who was driving and not drinking, so I suggested that we get one right away. We ended up arguing most of the night, not having much fun, driving back and forth on the whole island trying to find a place to sleep, and finally ended up sleeping cramped up in the rental car on the side of the road. I had to use the bathroom at one point, and me being a born and raised country girl, I decided to just go in the bushes. I got out of the car in the pitch black, tried to jump to a big rock, missed, and scraped the hell out of my leg and arm. When I woke up the next morning, there was dirt from my fall all over the back seat of the rental car where I had slept and my pants were covered in mud and dirt. It had rained briefly the night before, so the ground was just wet enough for the mud to really stick to me when I had fallen on my expedition to find a place to pee.
The next day was pretty awesome. We went to a really nice beach with huge waves where people were surfing. We also found a waterfall and much to our delight, a hotel where we could spend the night with a wonderful SHOWER!! The rest of the trip went pretty smoothly; we went to another beach, an old car museum (which was actually pretty cool), we saw the volcano crater, we went to a sex museum, and of course, made several trips to E-Mart (kinda like Walmart in the U.S.) to stock up on snacks. When the trip was over, I was super happy to be back to reality. Next time I travel, I want to be a little more prepared.
At the school, things changed more and more, and the foreign teachers had been given so many more classes that my free time was practically nonexistent. With our previous boss, we didn't have to worry about anyone trying to tell her what to do. She was very commanding and firmly stood her ground. Our current boss is the complete opposite and on top of that, has no experience in the education industry. Lately, one of the head teachers has been planning ridiculous changes and they have been approved by the boss because she doesn't know any better. This resulted in the foreign teachers having 14 classes each, per week, only in the mornings, and the Korean teachers having only 6 classes per week, in the mornings between two of them. Sound a little unfair?? I think so, but every time I would say something about it, no one would be willing to listen. I finally had my little blow up and magically the schedule changed to accommodate the foreigners a little better.
Ok, last story...
Last, week on Friday as I was getting ready to go home, I noticed some of my receipts from my wallet were on the floor. If any of you truly know me, you know that I am too much of a neat freak to simply allow anything like that to happen. When I checked my wallet, it was minus 500,000 (~$500)!!! At first I thought it was my foreign coworker playing a trick on me, but when I called him, he promised that he hadn't done it. We did a little investigation and concluded that it happened the last class of the day, but there were no kids roaming around at that time. We remembered that a former student and his family had come back that day to say hello to his former teachers. The mother was with her kid and a teacher the whole time, but the father was roaming around the school. We think the father took it, but with no fingerprints (we took the wallet to the CSI here and it came back with nothing), and no evidence, there was no more we could do. I have only ever had my things stolen twice and both times happened in Korea!
Until next time...
